A year or two ago I was attending a session presented by a businessman who grew up in South Africa. He drew an interesting parallel between the wild baboons from his native land and the counter-productive habits of many businesses today.

It just so happens that the South African baboons have taken a liking to the corn that local farmers grow there. Apparently, they organize raids on the cornfields on a frequent basis. The farmers obviously aren’t too pleased with this. Moreover, the baboons don’t manage their situation very intelligently.

In the excitement of finding such a feast, the hungry baboons run wildly through the field grabbing every ear of corn they can find off the stocks and cradling them in one arm against their chests. At some point they are carrying so many ears of corn that with each one they add to their bundle, one or two fall to the ground.  This doesn’t seem to phase the baboons as they continue running through the field, pulling ears of corn off the stocks, stuffing them under their arm, and losing as many as they find before being driven out by the farmer.

Does this sound familiar? Is your organization so focused on revenues that it forgets to protect what it has gained?  Using this analogy, it’s not that hard to see that the limiting factor for long term value creation is not so much what you can generate in revenue, but how much you can protect. As soon as you have more assets (tangible or otherwise) than you can properly protect, you become either a target for thieves, or an accident waiting to happen. If your budget doesn’t allow you to plan for safeguarding your assets, then you should be scaling back the scope of your growth plans to match what you can protect with acceptable risk.

From a more formal Risk Management viewpoint, when asset value increases significantly without increasing the safeguard capabilities, the total risk goes up. If you aren’t keeping an eye on things, you may not notice when the risk exceeds your acceptable threshold. Smart business managers should start losing sleep at night when they learn that they are over-exposed with risks they should not be taking.  They may even wake up in a cold sweat, with visions of corncobs dancing in their heads…